Mother's Day for Hope

I meant to post this on Sunday, but got so busy I missed out! But to honor the holiday and my mother, Hope...

Have you ever heard about the political origins of Mother’s Day? The declaration of a national Mother’s Day in 1914 was initiated by Anna M. Jarvis in the early nineteen hundreds, and first celebrated in a West Virginia church as a memorial celebration for women. While this crusade culminated in the successful foundation of the holiday, the movement in this country was rooted in an earlier activist movement, which sought better sanitary conditions, post-war reconciliation, and also inspired a call for peace and resistance to war. Anna M. Jarvis’ own mother (Anna Reeves Jarvis) was an activist in the Appalachians during the mid-1800s who worked to improve health and sanitary conditions by organizing women on both sides of the Civil War in “Mothers Work Days”. Over the course of about ten years, her efforts reconciled Union and Confederate neighbors by working toward a common goal. After the end of the war, she also initiated a “Mother’s Friendship Day” to reunite families and neighbors divided by the war.

But the inspiration for such a day came from a movement started by another woman, who worked for years to create a Mother’s Day for Peace. This woman, named Julia Ward Howe, authored the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in 1858, and through speaking engagements sparked by her celebrity, became sharply aware of the repercussions of war, including economic crises and the devastation that families, widows, soldiers, and orphans faced. After years of close contact with the post-war conditions, her resistance to the methods of war grew and twelve years later, she wrote a proclamation protesting the use of war to solve conflicts. In fierce, beautiful language, her “Mother’s Day Proclamation” appeals to mothers everywhere to resist the divisions that war creates in honor of our shared humanity. She proclaims, “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn/All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.” While her efforts to establish a Mother’s Day for Peace never went completely national, her work directly inspired the women whose efforts led to the foundation of the Mother’s Day we celebrate today.

I love this story so much. In terms of an activist movement, the values the women employed were sharp—the perfect combination of universal, inherent, and yet precise. The women spoke from their own experience and thus from a position of empowerment, skillfully relying on inherent values that they practiced daily to appeal to a common goal. And motherhood itself is a strong rallying cry, because who was not born from a mother? It reminds us that we have something in common no matter what our beliefs are, which is priceless in motivating action in a group. It always strikes me how the most revolutionary ideas are often those that are the most natural and practical, because they are unarguable. Values of health and safety, community, development, and non-aggression provided the root for this movement in its various forms.

And history illustrates other examples where women engaged feminine strength to advance a movement, such as the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina who demanded accountability from a corrupt dictatorship blamed for the disappearances and kidnappings of their family members during the Dirty War. In Juarez, Mexico, two mothers founded a group called May our Daughters Return Home after their government virtually ignored the deaths and disappearances of hundreds of women, including their daughters. And finally, in the vein of Julia Ward Howe, a group called Codepink protests the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and uses creative tactics and humor to make a call to "redirect our resources into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming activities."

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! And Happy Mother’s Day to all of us, a day to celebrate the archetypal divine feminine that continually creates and destroys, protects and encourages, that moves and inspires right action in the world.